"CONGRESS and President Obama have pushed through a relatively modest stopgap measure to avoid the “fiscal cliff,” but over the coming years, the United States will confront another huge cliff: Social Security.

In the first presidential debate, Mr. Obama described Social Security as “structurally sound,” and Mitt Romney said that “neither the president nor I are proposing any changes” to the program. It was a rare issue on which both men agreed — and both were utterly wrong.

For the first time in more than a quarter-century, Social Security ran a deficit in 2010: It spent $49 billion dollars more in benefits than it received in revenues, and drew from its trust funds to cover the shortfall. Those funds — a $2.7 trillion buffer built in anticipation of retiring baby boomers — will be exhausted by 2033, the government currently projects.

Those facts are widely known. What’s not is that the Social Security Administration underestimates how long Americans will live and how much the trust funds will need to pay out — to the tune of $800 billion by 2031, more than the current annual defense budget — and that the trust funds will run out, if nothing is done, two years earlier than the government has predicted.

We reached these conclusions, and presented them in an article in the journal Demography, after finding that the government’s methods for forecasting Americans’ longevity were outdated and omitted crucial health and demographic factors. . . . More retirees will receive benefits for longer than predicted, supported by the payroll taxes of relatively fewer working adults than projected.

Remarkably, since Social Security was created in 1935, the government’s forecasting methods have barely changed, even as a revolution in big data and statistics has transformed everything from baseball to retailing. . . .

As the wave of retirement by the baby boomers continues, doing nothing to shore up Social Security’s solvency is irresponsible. If the amount of money coming in through payroll taxes does not increase and if the amount of money going out as benefits remains the same, the trust funds will become insolvent less than 20 years from now.

To save Social Security, which has lifted generations of elderly people out of poverty, tough choices have to be made."

Summing Up

Tough choices indeed. Too many people now retire too early in their lives for those remaining workers to be able to realistically and properly afford to fund the prior retirees' promised benefits.

It's the exact same issue with teachers, firefighters and policemen as it is with other government and private sector workers. And for Social Security recipents as well.

As we age as a society, there are inevitably fewer workers to support more retirees. This is both simple math and simply unsustainable.

But it's worse than that. In addition to far too many retirees, we also have too many younger people unemployed, on welfare and receiving such things as Social Security disability benefits from those who do continue to work.

As more of us drop out of the work force, the lesser number of us who do work will have to pay for the growing nonproductive part of our population, regardless of the reason why non-workers increase in relation to workers over time. And regardless of whether the money passes through the government or not. It all originates from We the People and begins as someone's MOM.

It's time we all face the facts.

Only after We the People are finally ready, willing and able to confront the ugly reality that we've created for ourselves and for succeeding generations, will we be able to insist that our politicians admit the truth of that ugly reality and make the necessary changes to those programs to put our country on a fiscally responsible and sustainable path forward.

The lasting solution, whenever we have the guts to deal with the demographic reality of today, will necessarily involve painful choices concerning which generation will be reponsible to pay for our own generation's poor financial choices.

In other words, will it be our kids and grandkids or will it be us, as it should be?

These will not be easy choices for our society to make, for sure, but it's really a matter of simple math.

To get in the "know," we don't even need a calculator. We just need to use our common sense and admit that the government has no money of its own to spend on our behalf.